Examining a dyadic coaching based reminiscing intervention for parents of children with autism: Two exploratory case studies

Abstract

Parent-child interactions that involve discussion about past events are known as reminiscing. These conversations have been associated with child outcomes such as coherency in child narratives, advanced use of language, self-regulation abilities, and socioemotional skills (Waters et al., 2019). Differences in developmental outcomes such as verbal fluency and language, autobiographical memory and theory of mind and social/emotional understanding are often associated with autism (Faust, 2009; McDonnell et al., 2020; Gaelen, 2021). Interest in potential benefits of reminiscing interventions for children with autism has grown in recent years, given the associations between elaborative and emotion-rich reminiscing for typically developing children’s developmental outcomes (Brien & Hutchins, 2024). The aim of this study was to examine whether a three-session reminiscing intervention that includes live coaching would be associated with an increase in specific parent verbalisations, described in the intervention as ONCE skills: asking Open-ended questions, introducing Novel information, Confirming child utterances, and referencing internal/external Emotions/cognitions (Risi et al., 2024), as well as an increase in child elaborative and emotion/cognitive verbalisations. Participants were two parent-child dyads, where the child had a prior diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The dyads were asked to complete a pre-reminiscing intervention parent-child conversation without any coaching present. They discussed two conversations from everyday life: (1) a time their child did something new or different, and (2) a time their child did something when their parent wasn’t there. The first intervention session was parent only, during which an intervention handout detailing ONCE skills was reviewed alongside strategies to increase these skills, types of utterances to decrease during reminiscing conversations, and examples and role playing to teach concepts. Session two involved both the parent and child, in which dyads discussed three parent-selected past events. Parents were encouraged to bring photos or other cues related to the event (Bhana et al., 2023). Live coaching via a headset occurred during this session, where the coach highlighted and encouraged use of the ONCE skills (Risi et al., 2024; Vess & Campbell, 2022). Session three was the second coaching session, in which dyads were again asked to discuss the three-parent selected past events, to bring photos or other cues, and live coaching again occurred. All sessions were conducted over Zoom. The current study found that for both dyads, parental use of novel information increased from pre-reminiscing conversations to either one or both subsequent intervention session conversations. Novel information included statement elaborations, elaborative yes/no questions, and elaborative open-ended questions. Counter to our predictions, there was minimal change in parental use of open-ended questions, confirmations, or references to emotions and cognitions. The current study also intended to examine whether parent training of ONCE skills was associated with an increase in children’s use of memory elaborations and emotion/cognition verbalisations during reminiscing. For children in both dyads, average memory elaborations increased from pre-reminiscing to intervention sessions. Counter to predictions, for both dyads, children’s use of emotion and cognition verbalisations decreased slightly from the pre-reminiscing session to the intervention sessions. Overall, the intervention was associated with an increase in novel information verbalisations from parents during parent-child reminiscing conversations, and an increase in memory elaborations from children. Further research is needed to understand how novel information, open-ended questions, and emotion discussion function for children with autism and their parents, to inform future reminiscing interventions.